"I've Always Been Clean"
Yes, this may be a fantastical image, though I am hopeful that my family will have happy, stress-free meals. I want my son to associate eating with being social, with other people.
I don't.
Once Mom realized that Kevin and I clashed as dinner companions, she dropped me. Suddenly eating for her was all about fat, meat, sugar, and Kevin. She cooked real french fries and bacon cheeseburgers, the plates dripping with grease, and ferried them to Kevin's place. She shopped at a special butcher, burning up the moped rubber to get there, for the proper ingredients for Swedish meatballs. The woman who used to prepare hot carob was baking trays of brownies oozing with real chocolate. I wasn't invited to the party. She always left me a plate, though.
Even before that were the dinners with Silent Tim. Was he not talking on purpose? Was I such a terrible dinner companion? What did I do wrong?
But long, long before
dinners with Silent Tim were dinners with a
man that we still call John the Murderer (if
you ever want to read about John the
Murderer, Calvin Trillin has an essay about
him, "I've Always Been
Clean," in the 1984 book
Killings, taken from his New
Yorker essays). We lived with John when I
was about three, for less than a year.
Since he only had two chairs at his
kitchen table, I stood for meals.
This has always been a little factoid of my
life, perhaps made slightly more interesting
by the Trillin coverage (my grandmother kept
a file of clippings from the local newspapers
on John's later trial for perjury; I wish I
had that file). I barely remember standing at
the table. What I do remember is being proud
that I could play quietly in his presence. I
also remember being afraid.
This factoid has legs.